Flannery (10 page)

But sitting on the edge of the lake as the sun was setting, with my toes kicking through the water and Tyrone skimming along behind the boat, watching Tyrone so full of happiness, and his stepdad at the helm, I realized something. Marty was evil.

On the last spin around, the boat turned hard and Marty told Tyrone to let go of the rope. He yelled it at him. His voice hoarse and angry.

Let go, he yelled.

Tyrone was coming for the wharf too fast. Maybe his stepdad really did think it would be cool for Tyrone to have a dry landing. That's what he said later. Kid was doing so well out there, Marty shouted at Tyrone's mother, he's a goddamn natural.

The truth is, my mother was in love with Hank at that wedding. Of course I didn't understand that in quite those words.

Use your words. I didn't use those words back then. I was nine.

In love
.

All I knew was that Hank used to sleep over. Hank had been around the house for what seemed like an eternity, but it was actually only three years. I had experienced peanut butter and honey for the first time because of Hank. And tie-dyed T-shirts, because we did that on the back deck. And I'd acquired a taste for curry and olives (not at the same time).

He'd read me to sleep sometimes. He started coming around after
Charlotte's Web
, which was a short-lived guy named Dave, the boyfriend before Hank, but was there for
Harriet the Spy
.

And he let me cuddle into him on the couch when Miranda had to work late waitressing, and he carried me out of the taxi if they were coming home from parties and once a drop of rain fell on my forehead and woke me up and I was wrapped in my Mickey Mouse blanket and Hank was smelling like Hank and Miranda was paying the driver and they were tipsy and she caught up with us and leaned in for a kiss in the red taillights of the taxi and my head was squished between their chests.

Hank was only around for three years but it felt like everything I'd ever known, except for
Charlotte's Web
Dave, who was also nice. But Dave wasn't love.

Hank was love for Miranda.

Real honest, go-for-it, live-it, be-in-it, give-everything-to-it love.

Miranda and Hank broke up around the time the second Harry Potter came out, because he wanted to go to law school in Nova Scotia and he couldn't “do long distance,” he said, and Miranda wouldn't go with him because I was in school, and four months later Hank was marrying someone else.

Someone who had no kids and who could go with him to Nova Scotia and who was also accepted to law school and who had dark hair and big eyes and wore the pearl engagement ring belonging to Hank's great-grandmother which Hank had previously given to Miranda but which Miranda had given back because they were breaking up and she'd used butter to slide it off because her fingers were swollen which should have told stupid Hank something.

The sun was almost completely down as Tyrone came plowing toward the dock on the waterskis, and it made a final dark-orange flare on the dark water.

I was feeling funny because I'd had too much sun. Not since the words “You may now kiss the bride” had anyone asked me where my hat was or if I had on sunscreen. All day it seemed the adults were not themselves. Nobody paid any attention to me. Nobody counted how many glasses of Orange Crush I had or told me to wash my face.

Hank, though, had picked me up and kissed me on the forehead. Of course I was too big for that.

I'd seen him getting ready. He was wearing a tuxedo and standing before a full-length mirror, absorbed in the carnation he was putting in his lapel. Sticking in the pin. His mouth drawn down in a frown.

I'd seen Miranda pat his chest earlier with her patent-leather clutch. She tapped him with it. She asked if he'd still change her spark plugs now and then.

He just said her name. He said it softly, but he waved her purse away from the spot where it had come to rest on the accordion pleats of his white, white shirt.

I'd come upon him fixing his carnation in front of the mirror just before the actual ceremony. Everyone else was outside sitting on the white chairs in the hard heat, lined up in rows on the brilliant green lawn, but I'd gone through the back door because we'd been sitting there so long in the sun I felt funny and I needed to go to the bathroom.

There he was in the last bedroom just before the bathroom, and he saw me in the mirror behind him, leaning on the doorframe. He turned and grabbed me up in his arms and hugged me. I almost screamed because he was hurting my sunburn so much. He kissed my forehead and I couldn't move because of the burn and also because I wanted him to hug me. One of my gumshoes fell off. He set me down on the floor and I stood for a moment just looking into his eyes. I was trying to say something with my eyes. I was trying to say, Don't you care about us? I thought you loved us. And, You're hurting my mother's feelings.

Hank pointed to my collar and said, You spilled something on your shirt. Is that ketchup?

When I looked down, he chucked me under the nose. I fell for it every time.

Very funny, I said. And then I felt tears coming and it made me mad to cry in front of Hank and I hissed at him, You look stupid in that suit. It's too small for you.

I grabbed up the gumshoe that had fallen off when he hugged me and I stormed down the hall to the bathroom, trying for some funny reason to look dignified and grown up, except I was hobbling along because I was only wearing one shoe.

Miranda was wearing a floaty chiffon number that day, loose at the waist, and she wasn't crying a bit. She also wasn't drinking. There were children everywhere and the cake was really something.

It had five tiers and the little plastic bride and groom dolls were on surfboards in white bathing suits, because Hank's new in-laws were giving them a honeymoon in Hawaii for a wedding present.

Maybe that was the icing on the cake for Miranda, because she couldn't travel with Hank when they were together because she had me and I had school and she was broke and her mother had died young and left her nothing in the way of an inheritance and her father, like my own, had never made an appearance.

I had the feeling Hank had left Miranda because he couldn't face the responsibility of me. Who wants to take on somebody else's kid? Miranda had a big student loan and a degree in fine art and not a whole lot of prospects, financially speaking.

Personally, I thought she had blown his mind for a while because she was an artist, because she was dazzling in her
numbers
night and day, because she knew someone who was growing poems in a laboratory with mold cultures and scientific equipment, because she could throw a pot on a pottery wheel and she could throw a party where everybody came and sang in the kitchen until dawn, with banjos and ukuleles and bodhrans and bells and the spoons and guitars, shouting about politics and all the kids charged the adults money to use the bathroom and we made a fortune and the adults went skinny-dipping in the Bannerman Park pool at dawn.

But something had given Hank a fright. He had been accepted at Dalhousie for law and gave up auto repair. Then he was spending time with this woman whose parents were a retired politician and a judge and who had lots of money and who had also been accepted to Dal. The woman was kind of crisp at the edges, with ironed straight hair and tailored suits and new hiking gear, and she somehow made Miranda look shabby and frayed.

Beside that woman, Miranda's glamor dimmed and maybe she just looked poor to Hank. Poor and rundown. I heard him shouting one night that it had been a nice dream, but that's all it was,
dreaming
.

I had no idea what he could mean. It frightened me and I pinched myself just to make sure I was awake. I pinched myself to make sure I existed.

Did he think that not having money made people unreal?

Maybe he was right. Maybe we were invisible.

Tyrone's face, as he was flying toward that dock after he let go of the rope, was still full of the thrill of getting up on the skis for the very first time. I think that's what pissed Marty off. But I saw the joy switch to terror just before he hit the dock. The edge of the wharf broke one of his ribs and made a total mess of his clavicle which would require a metal plate and some permanent screws and would possibly give him arthritis in his thirties, the doctors said.

I had to shout for help, but I felt like I couldn't even make a squeak. I felt my voice was coming out in a whisper. But I must have actually shouted pretty loud because I was quickly crowded out of the way.

Tyrone's mother was swaying on the outskirts of the crowd that had gathered around Tyrone, and then she just sank down into the grass, her skirt riding up so it showed the control panel of her stockings, her champagne flute still upright. She was pinching the skinny plastic stem of the glass and one of her pinkies was curled out. She hadn't spilled a drop.

She knocked the champagne back and tossed the glass into the bushes and got herself standing back up again and smoothed down her skirt and followed the crowd back up to the big house. Tyrone was in some other person's arms, and Marty was cursing and swearing under his breath and trying to steer the boat back into the boathouse.

My arms and legs and belly were stinging. I had goosebumps, and the hair on my arms was standing up.

I had understood about evil. I had seen how it was ordinary and stupid and there was nothing magical or fairytale-like about it.

It was just a grown-up taking his problems out on a kid. Because he could. Because nobody stopped him.

It was easy to hate Tyrone. He was too huggy. He hugged everyone and Marty thought it was girly. Knock it off with the hugging. Grow up. Even at ten Tyrone could draw. He was goofy and when he laughed really hard sometimes Orange Crush would come out his nose and his whole body would shake with it. He hooted when he laughed. Whoo-hoo-hoo. He did sometimes chew with his mouth open. He had a big vocabulary and Marty didn't. He never ran out of energy. Except when he ran out of energy, which happened all at once, and then he would be hard to wake up, because he could sleep very deeply.

Everything he did was all or nothing.

Tyrone was driven hard through the water, and his skis popped off, and he was lucky he had missed hitting the dock with his face because he would have lost every tooth in his head.

Just before he hit the wharf, he screamed.

His freckles, his deep brown eyes.

After they carried him up to the house, I was alone. I leaned over the water and threw up all the barbecued hotdogs I had wolfed down and gallons of Orange Crush and a cucumber sandwich and I have never eaten hotdogs since or cucumber and I've switched to Lime Crush.

Can you picture the very particular pink-gray color of a thrown-up hotdog, floating, as it was, on the surface of the lake and bright bits of thrown-up orange processed cheese?

I was in love.

I knew I was in love with Tyrone O'Rourke.

This is how hopeless the situation was. I still believed in Santa Claus. I believed that my father would show up one day out of the blue, even though he didn't know I existed.

I believed my mother was a goddess and that she was always right and that Hank had something wrong with him for leaving us.

How could he not love Miranda and me? Hank, who had hugged me when my skin was so sore from sunburn, and how much I would miss him.

I still hid my baby teeth under my pillow for the tooth fairy, but I had begun to doubt the tooth fairy.

I knew Miranda put the money under my pillow and sometimes she forgot and once I'd just held out my hand with the tooth and she reached in her pocket and took out five bucks and put it in my hand and dropped the tooth in an amber-colored pill bottle on the top shelf in the kitchen cupboard behind a broken toaster. The pill bottle had all my other baby teeth but I had forgotten to stop believing in the tooth fairy. (My mother had forgotten to stop believing she would ever get the broken toaster fixed.)

Not believing in something requires a lot of effort. It is easier to believe. Once I have accepted that something is true, I have a hard time losing faith in it.

I believed in Tyrone and I will always believe in him. I mean that there is something in him, something I can't even say or put into words that makes me love him and it's so scary, loving someone.

It's a big, out-of-control, jumping-jack love that makes me crazy and lonely.

Of course it went away when he went to a different junior high. I joined the drama club and the school newspaper at Brother Rice, and I was busy with Amber, and there was the birth of Felix.

Or maybe I just put it on hold. Because when Tyrone O'Rourke comes into a room I find it hard to not believe we are meant for each other, because I know him inside out, since forever.

12

Mr. Payne has announced Part B of our Entrepreneurship unit. We have to approach a person, or persons, in the business sector and conduct a recorded interview about the promotion and sales of our units. We are supposed to choose a business representative who has marketing experience related to our particular projects.

Mr. Payne makes it sound like there are gazillions of business people out there just dying to share their time and sales strategies with a bunch of grade-grubbing high-school students.

And he's giving us only two weeks.

Amber and Gary have already decided they're interviewing some big film producer who happens to be in town filming a battle re-enactment for a documentary about the First World War. Even Elaine Power looked impressed when she heard that.

But who am I supposed to interview about magic potions?

On top of the interview, Mr. Payne wants us to hand in revisions to our project proposals next week and have the prototypes of our actual projects ready on November 2nd. We have this very demanding timeline for the project because, as Mr. Payne says, he's teaching us how manufacturing works in the “real” world. He seemed to sort of love my plan for the potions, though — I mean
our
plan — except he said it was too ambitious for a start-up. Choose just one kind of potion, he said. We can diversify later if the product is a hit.

It's been two weeks since Tyrone has been in school. He doesn't answer my texts and he's probably lost his phone. He's probably couch surfing at the apartment of some university students he met and sleeping until one because he's playing video games all night and getting stoned.

His mother told Miranda that she's getting daily automated phone calls from the school.
A person in your household named TYRONE
 . . .

She says he shows up every day before Marty gets home from work and tosses a few pizza pockets in the oven and then he's gone again on his motorcycle, leaving her to yell out the front door about wearing a helmet.

Since Miranda won't let me take the cell phone to school (she's waiting for a call from a journalist who wants to talk about her new project — she's working in neon now), I have to wait to get home to text Tyrone.

I text him after dinner:
Payne says we need to choose only one potion. What do you think?

I certainly don't expect to hear back from him.

But before I go to bed I go up to Miranda's study to check the phone. And there's a two-word message from SprayPig. It says,
Definitely Love.

Boom. Boom, boom.

Okay, I know it doesn't mean that Tyrone definitely loves me. I
know
that. I know it doesn't mean he's
not
serious about that parrot-haired girl I saw him with at the mall or that they've broken up.

It does not mean that he'll show up at school to help with our
Definitely
Love
potion. And it doesn't even mean he'll lift a finger to help us get a good mark on
our
project. I'm not a total fool!

So why is my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest? Why am I clutching the phone so tightly in both hands, holding it over my very-loud-pounding heart?

Well, what's a girl to think? After weeks of silence — 
Definitely Love
.

I put the phone down on the desk, right where it was. But I pick it up again and read the text again. SprayPig — that's Tyrone.
Definitely Love.

What are you doing in my office? Miranda calls up from downstairs.

Oh, nothing, I say.

You sound funny, she says.

Really? I say. There's no worry about Miranda reading the text. She doesn't know how to open them. She's never texted in her life, though I've certainly offered to teach her. But she has materialized silently in the doorway of her study.

What's up? she says. And steps into the room and lays her hand on my forehead.

You're all flushed, she says.

Just heading to bed, I say. And I trot down the stairs and get in under the blankets and layers of dirty laundry piled on my bed and stay awake for a long time, thinking in the dark.

It doesn't really mean anything, I keep telling myself.

It probably just means that I am going to feel seriously f--ked up, as Miranda would say if she were writing this, only she of course would spell out the whole word, which I refuse to do.

Miranda believes there is no such thing as bad language, only the inappropriate use of language in a given circumstance. She believes curse words, including some very disgusting ones, have a radical power and they can make huffy, uptight people uncomfortable, which Miranda believes is generally a good thing to do.

Miranda thinks these sorts of people are, generally speaking, too prissy for their own good and a well-placed curse word can have the effect of a “laxative for the soul.” Loosen up all those stoppages. She has blogged as much.

I refuse to use the F-word because I believe f--king, should I ever have a chance to engage in that physical/spiritual/emotional activity, is a beautiful thing, or has the potential to be a beautiful thing, maybe, and that it should be treated as if it's secret and sacred, and it should definitely not be spoken of in such harsh language, or so casually, or without respect for its beauty, actually, and maybe not even spoken of anywhere at all.

Because I think it should be private and maybe wordless, if you know what I mean. Something between two people. But if you do have to speak of it for some reason, I think
making love
is a really nice way to describe sex if one has to describe it.

Miranda thinks this is a very silly idea. Which I think is ironic given that when it came time for her to explain sex to
me
, she failed pretty spectacularly.

Miranda sat me down on the edge of the bathtub with a picture book about sex when I was eight. I don't know why she chose the bathroom. But there we were, sitting on the side of the tub, the clear plastic shower curtain covered with angelfish tugged back so the fish looked like they were swimming somewhere in a big hurry, all banging into each other.

Miranda's policy was, If kids ask, you answer.

With the truth.

She's blogged all about this theory too, of course.

Apparently I'd asked about the box of tampons in the cupboard under the bathroom sink. What are those things? was probably all I said.

From tampons, Miranda's thinking must have gone, It's time for the sex talk.

Miranda decided to present the whole thing with a library book. A picture book. I thought it was strange when I saw it in her hands because we'd already progressed to I Can Read chapter books.

But in the little book there was a drawing of a man and a woman. The man was on top of the woman. They were kissing. It showed their outlines, but it also showed what was inside them, as if their bodies were transparent.

It showed the man's penis fitting snugly into the woman's vagina. It showed little sacks inside the woman with lines drawn from the sacks to words like
ovaries
and
womb
, and it all looked painful, like there wasn't room inside the woman's vagina for that ugly-looking penis, and what the hell were they doing, why was the man on top of her, probably squashing the life out of her? How had these two people ever agreed to this, how had they found themselves with each other without their clothes on, and what was the bizarre exchange of words, to end up in this position with his penis sticking into her vagina?

I was
flabbergasted.
That's the word. It's a word that shows up in the old yellowed Agatha Christie novels you find at your friends' summer cabins. There are British people in those novels with big green lawns and rock walls and there are little old ladies who murder people with arsenic or by stabbing them straight through the forehead with an ice pick, and portly butlers with double chins and cooks with bright red faces and rectors, whatever they are. Those are the kinds of people who get flabbergasted.

And little eight-year-old girls sitting on the side of the tub in the midst of a school of terrified angelfish, with their mothers and a library book about sex.

I thought about Miranda going to the children's library to borrow the book. The chat she and the librarian must have had.

I would never go to that library again.

Why would anybody do that? I shrieked. Why?

I felt betrayed. I felt like there was a big secret and I was mad it had been kept from me and mad that I had been told about it.

I was deeply angry with whoever had invented this crazy thing. I knew, without being told, that the line drawing in the little pastel book with the organs and the eggs and the kissing people was a cover story for a horrendous, crazy explosion of emotion and weirdness.

Now that I knew about it, there was no
not
knowing about it. No going back.

Then it hit me.

That was the way I had come into existence. People sit down on the sides of cold bathtubs everywhere, with their mothers and with books that begin deceptively with a picture of flowers and some bees hovering, and it's
la-la-la
with the pretty drawings, and a box of tampons tucked into their bathroom cupboards near the snaking, cold, sweating pipe that curls out of the sink — the pipe that's there to get rid of toothpaste spit and germs and scum. People find themselves in that situation, because those people have mothers who have had sex.

That's how I had come into being.

Miranda had done this terrible thing.

To make me.

I stayed far away from any book that might have to do with sex until grade seven. That's when Amber and I got our hands on a fat paperback called
Love's Tender Fury
and we sussed out the steamy parts and read them over and over. Every time something was about to happen — something hotter and more anatomically complicated than a kiss — the heroine swooned.

As far as we could gather, the swoon occurred because of the extreme tenderness of the kiss.

First there was a struggle on the woman's part to avoid the kiss. She'd fling her head to the side and all her long tendrils would fly around, covering her face, her shoulders, her soft, plump, heaving breasts. She had a lot of hair. It tangled and coiled as she thrashed. But the hero held her arms firmly in his grip. He was calmness itself.

Then she'd just happen to look in his eyes, totally by accident, and she would pull an emotional one-eighty. Instantly, she'd be all for the kiss. She couldn't get enough of it.

What the hell, we thought.

She didn't want the kiss. She wanted the kiss. There was nothing in between. Then she swooned.

Swooning was generally followed by some of the fury mentioned in the title. But the swoon part, that was love, dawning in all its glory.

Now I think love must be more like a strike than a swoon. You get
struck
is the way I imagine it, is the way I feel about Tyrone. Struck with awe by every single thing about him, his army surplus knapsack, the way the cuffs of his jeans are worn down to white threads on the back, his big eyes and the curly black hair and the way he walks, long limbs all over the place and how tall he got in grade ten and his eyelashes and his freckles and once, when he first transferred to Holy Heart and saw me by the lockers, and we were talking just like when we were kids, as if no time had passed, he pushed my hair back with a finger, just tucked a loose strand of my hair behind my ear and my ear burned even though we'd known each other since car seats. Our moms went to movies with us in the middle of the afternoon and breastfed us in the back row, which is kind of weird but I'm just saying — pretty much since we were born.

Lying in bed, under all that laundry, thinking about his
Definitely Love
text, I also remembered that little wave while he was waterskiing.

But love is not just something that befalls you. It's also hard work, the work of believing in someone. This is another theory of Miranda's that she's drummed into my head. It's been pretty hard this past week to believe in Tyrone when he has been so absent — from school, from our project, seemingly from the face of the earth — and I am depending on him to help me with this project. Amber has Gary helping her and everyone else has their partner helping and I have no one, basically.

So love is work and it's always changing and it's making and noticing and needing and giving and definite. It's definite.

Definitely Love
.

It's a start.